A quietly intriguing column from the brains behind BBC’s QI. This week: QI
does lunch

Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what’s for lunch. Orson Welles

Nuncheon

Luncheon is a relative newcomer in the daily round of meals, only emerging in the late 17th century. The word itself is a bit of a mystery and is probably a collision between two different things: lunch, a northern dialect word for a hunk of bread or cheese, and nuncheon, a midday snack, from Old English none, “noon” + schench, “drink”.

In the Middle Ages, there were only two significant meals: dinner, eaten at noon, and supper, eaten in the late afternoon. This made practical sense: the middle of the day was when people needed an energy boost, and eating in the dark required expensive artificial lighting.

But over the centuries, patterns of work and social fashion pushed dinner time further and further back into the day. By the mid 18th century, most households ate dinner at 5pm; by the mid 19th century, it was 8 or 9pm. This created the space for new meals earlier in the day: tea (first recorded in 1739) and luncheon (1652), first shortened to “lunch” in 1829.

There is a belief that the term “ploughman’s lunch” was coined in the Sixties by the English Country Cheese Council as a marketing ploy to sell British cheese in pubs.

Apparently not: there are accounts of the name being used by pubs as early as the Forties, and even a mention in 1837’s Life of Walter Scott of “an extemporised sandwich, that looked like a ploughman’s lunch”.

What seems most likely is that post-war cheese marketers were determined to remind the public of the long-standing practice of eating bread and cheese at lunchtime, which had been interrupted by rationing in the Second World War. In doing so, they helped turn a traditional name for bread, cheese, beer and pickles into a non-copyrighted super-brand, universally recognised throughout the British Isles.

Mysterious lunch

In a 2007 interview, George MacDonald Fraser (1925-2008), author of the Flashman historical novels, recalled a now forgotten lunch between two literary greats: “A publisher called Stoddard invited [Oscar] Wilde and [Sir Arthur] Conan Doyle… As a result Doyle wrote The Sign of Four and Wilde wrote The Picture of Dorian Gray. And the only thing that Doyle remembered was that they discussed war and Wilde had said, “It’s getting to the stage where there won’t be armies, two chemists with test tubes will approach the front line.”

Productive lunch

A great advert for the importance of the institution of lunch took place in 1914, when the celebrated Belarus-born chemist Chaim Weizmann (1874-1952) was entertained by CP Scott, the editor of the Manchester Guardian. When Scott asked what he was working on, Weizmann replied that he had just perfected a new technique for safely synthesising acetone, a highly explosive substance used in cleaning products and explosives. A week later, Scott was lunching with the Prime Minister, Lloyd George, who complained that the war effort was foundering for a want of acetone. The rest is, literally, history. The British munitions industry outproduced the Germans and the war was won. When asked what he wanted as a reward, Weizmann – a lifelong Zionist — asked for a Jewish state. He got one, largely as a result of the Balfour Declaration of 1917, and became the first president of Israel in 1949. All because of lunch.

Uneaten lunch

During rehearsals for Peter Pan, JM Barrie (1860-1937) ordered brussels sprouts every day for lunch, but never ate them. When his friend William Nicholson asked him why, Barrie said: “I cannot resist ordering them. The words are so lovely to say.” According to research by the University of Georgia, refined Europeans like their sprouts 1.25cm (half an inch) in diameter, and Americans prefer them 2.5-5cm (1-2in).

Tactical lunch

The French writer Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893) liked to eat lunch in the restaurant of the Eiffel Tower because he hated the structure, and it was the only place he could not see it. He really hated it: “A high and skinny pyramid of iron ladders, this giant ungainly skeleton upon a base that looks built to carry a colossal monument of Cyclops, but just peters out into a ridiculous thin shape like a factory chimney.”

The Second Book of General Ignorance by John Lloyd & John Mitchinson (£12.99) is published by Faber & Faber

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